WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word (SOTW) address today from Tokyo Node Hall in Tokyo, Japan. This marks the second time the event was held outside North America, following last year's address in Madrid, Spain.
This year's event spanned three hours, with a special emphasis on Japanese culture. Matt explained, "We've gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really "of the space," so we're doing a few extra things this year. My presentation will include Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura, but also part of it will be in Japanese and presented by Junko Fukui Nukaga. We'll have a piano performance by Aiko Takei. After the presentation and Q&A we'll do a panel in Japanese with Mieko Kawakami, Craig Mod, Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi."
Matt enumerated the WordPress contributions of the Japanese community, mainly Translation, and Wapuu. Japan was the country that made him realize that WordPress was more than a blogging tool, and Kansei engineering fascinates him.
A Japanese WordPress site was set up in December 2003, just six months after WordPress was launched. The version originally called "WordPress ME" (WordPress Multilingual Edition) was maintained by a user called Otsukare. Wapuu, the official mascot character of WordPress, was designed by Kazuko Kaneuchi in 2011 and is GPL licensed.
Matt then shared some statistics:
The event also highlighted the progression of Gutenberg, which is entering its third phase focused on collaboration. Matias Ventura, Gutenberg's lead architect, discussed upcoming features that will enable users to collaborate directly within the editor, including leaving comments and receiving notifications, similar to Google Docs.
WordPress is for everyone. So we need to really put our minds together into working out how can it be the best writing tool, the best design tool, the best developer experience. It takes time, it takes effort from the whole community but I think it's very rewarding.
- Matias Ventura
The team is also working on a 'Zoom out' feature. He then talked about Styles, the theme JSON structure, block bindings, query block, the ongoing efforts to address the lack of responsive tools in the editor, and the new Registered Blog Template API, which has simplified the process of registering and managing custom templates.
"We have a lot to go through," Ventura said, "and we want to approach this one through sort of four lenses, and that is Write, Design, Build, and Develop."
WordPress Playground was another exciting feature discussed. This tool allows WordPress to run instantly on any device without hosting, enabling users to experiment without installations. New updates include support for multiple instances within a single window, the integration of Blueprints (JSON files for setting up your WordPress Playground instance), and a Playground block that embeds WordPress instances within WordPress itself. Mullenweg emphasized that these innovations aim to make WordPress more accessible and powerful while preserving its open-source ethos.
We don't want to just make things that work. We want to make them beautiful.
- Matt Mullenweg
WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard said she hopes to resolve the WP Engine issue equitably. She said, "So like Matt, I believe that when you choose WordPress, you should get WordPress. And that should never be anything that somebody is confused about. And that's something that I personally believe is worth fighting for and driving my driving force and motivation of taking on this role because we've come too far as an open source platform and we should not stand by as it's being exploited or watered down for the short-term gains of a few at the expense of the long-term needs of the many because WordPress belongs to all of us, us and to our community and that's what I'm most passionate about."
She also talked about Learn WordPress which now features structured learning pathways, and Openverse which has expanded to include 884 million images and 4.2 million audio files, nearly 4 million page views this month alone and over 21 million API requests.
WordPress does belong to us all and what we're doing is taking care of it for the next generation and the next generation is critical to WordPress's ongoing growth as a platform and making it accessible and frictionless as possible has never been more important.
- Mary Hubbard
Grassroots programs are flourishing and she mentioned two programmes - WP Campus Connect from India and National ICT Innovation Hub from Uganda.
WordPress Community Program Supporter and Team Rep Junko Fukui Nukaga shared the updates on Japan and WordPress. Japanese is now the fourth most used language in the world by WordPress. In October 2024, the Japanese WordPress community celebrated DigitalCube's IPO on the Tokyo PRO Market. Other notable Japanese businesses include Contact Form 7, HAMWORKS, SAKURA Internter, KOMOJU and Xserver.
Japan is also home to 26 active meetup groups and 11265 community members who hosted 189 local meetups this year. Japan's contribution to the Core are growing.
Matt then mentioned the contributions of Aki Hamano, a Core Committer (made 774 contributions to WordPress core with 338 props for 6.7),and Akira Tachibana, an active Docs Team member. 13 Japanese contributors supported 5.4% of WordPress 6.6 development.
Matt had announced Data Liberation at last year's State of the Word to be the gold standard of liberation and interoperability. The idea is not just to make WordPress more powerful but to ensure that it's truly free. It's the freedom to move content anywhere, to collaborate without barriers or constraints. WordPress Playground plays a critical role in this vision.
"Some people might see 2024 as a year of distractions or attacks from bad actors in the community. But it was really a year of growth and focus where we were able to accelerate so many things that we're doing. It was also an amazing year of growth in a lot of areas.", he said.
The event also had a short Q&A session where Mullenweg fielded questions about the future of blogging, whether the performance plugin of WordPress will be integrated into core, AI-generated content, digital identity, and democratising publishing.
Matt also congratulated developer Aki Hamano. He then talked about Automattic's missions - to democratize publishing, democratize commerce (with WooCommerce), and democratize messaging (through Beeper). These three things will keep him busy for life, and he revealed that he'll work on WordPress for the rest of his life, which he considers to be an honour and privilege.
The event had two panel discussions moderated by Mary Hubbard. The first panel featuring Mieko Kawakami, Craig Mod and Matt explored 'Publishing in the Open' while the second panel of Hajime Ogushi, Genki Taniguchi, and Matt discussed 'The Future of WordPress in Japan and Beyond'.
The event was live-streamed and is available on WordPress YouTube channel.